


How Narrow The Gate?

by Lianvis (Madeira_Darling)



Series: Pathbreaker [6]
Category: Wraeththu - Storm Constantine
Genre: Family Dynamics, Infidelity, M/M, Other, POV Multiple, Suicide Attempt, Therapy, Trauma
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 21:46:53
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 995
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30146055
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Madeira_Darling/pseuds/Lianvis
Summary: A companion piece to By The Sword by Jarad, telling the story of Jassenah's therapeutic relationship with Abrimel.  Can this deeply embittered har find his way back to his chesnari and a real future?  Can Jassenah find love again after Ysobi's betrayal?
Relationships: Abrimel/Ponclast (Wraeththu), Gesaril/Jassenah (Wraeththu)
Series: Pathbreaker [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2174013
Comments: 2
Kudos: 2





	How Narrow The Gate?

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Jarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jarad/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Who Live By The Sword](https://archiveofourown.org/works/29591517) by [Jarad](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jarad/pseuds/Jarad). 



> This will work better if read along with By The Sword.

Abrimel:

I’m here because he’s here and I hate it here. I thought we were maybe getting a happily-ever-after, first there, then in the pretty prison house with the pretty prison garden where we were held together... 

_Held together_

Maybe I should have held him tighter. I don’t know. I’m here and there’s a pretty blond har with a nice accent here to see me, to talk me through my  _ feelings _ on all this. What can I feel after finding him, my lover-- if we’re still that to each other after everything, with a  _ sword _ up his cunt--? Lam, cunt is a human word but lam is so soft, too soft a word for anything on him, my raven-haired witch-queen bad-mommy demon-lover with hands as clean and white as a doctor’s.

What can I feel except empty? He was the one holding the bag with all my feelings in it after all these years, the one I maybe left holding the bag when everything fell apart but he vanished so quick, the blink of an eye and gone and I’m left waiting, waiting, waiting, bitter as bitter tears, bitter greens, bitter almonds like cyanide.

Everything is pretty and so nice I want to break things. I think that’s why I love him, loved him with blood pouring from between his legs, like a queen in a tragic pre-raphaelite painting and his long long hair all around him, loose and everywhere the way it hadn’t been since we’d come back. Hair black as night, blood as red as blood, and skin snow white, like marble, like a statue of agony. He’s not nice, and he’s not pretty, beautiful yes, but pretty is too tame a word for him. He let awful things be awful, wasn’t afraid of the howling storm in my chest, of my hands clawing at my face when he held me and howled with me at the icy moon through the cursed trees of the poison forest where we had first made love.

He let me out. I have spent all my life in prisons, but for those few months with him and then back in the box. I wonder if I’m the same har he remembers, I’m probably not. Was he disappointed by me? Had I lost all the color and contrast he’d granted me when we’d been together? Had he idealized me in memory? Was I only interesting when I had just fallen from grace, when I’d been the Tigron’s heir… even if I had been an unloved one?

I wished he’d look at me the way he did in Gebbadon, like he longed for me, like I was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen, like I myself was a treasure. Nohar had ever treasured me for myself, except for my hostling, and even he had not treasured me more than he treasured my father, and his station.

I’ve never been able to forgive him that… Caeru, my hostling. If he hadn’t come, hadn’t decided to stay who would I have been? I could have been a carefree barefoot rock singer’s son running along blue blue water in Ferelithia, with a story of a bewitchingly beautiful father who’d vanished to weave into magnificent stories for myself. If I hadn’t had my father to hate in my face, I might have loved my looks. I know I am beautiful, but that beauty is so much his, that I feel like my face is yet another privilege unwillingly granted, and what is not his is Caeru’s and his beauty doesn’t even belong to him any longer. He’s an icon, a face on a coin. He sold his face to the world for a palace and a chance to be close to my father, so mine can’t be mine either and so I’ve spent most of my life dressing drably, trying not to emphasize anything that might draw attention to my too visible heritage, but Ponclast… he made me feel when we met like I was just myself, and with him I didn’t see my parents ill-starred union in the mirror.

I’d been so acetic before him, and the tendency had returned so quickly after, that it was hard to imagine the sensuality of the har I’d been for those too brief months. Colors had been beautiful, the sensation of silk on my skin, stolen delicacies suddenly alive with flavor on my tongue when they had tasted of little more than ash before. The world had turned monochrome again when he’d gone, just like the photograph of us I’d secreted away. The two of us and Geburael, two hara and their newborn harling. It was such a painfully normal photo for all the insanity of our circumstances, both of us smiling with such hope, such belief.

I had had such faith in him then, and perhaps in myself, in the har I believed he saw me as. I felt that because of the way he’d looked at me I could soften him, that I could stay his red right hand from committing more atrocities. He had committed them anyway, right under my nose and now though I knew I loved him still. Had he been trying to spare me? Or spare himself the lecture? I’d never asked, afraid of the fight we might have had.

I am a coward, like my father before me. That is one thing at least, the new Tigron, Calanthe is not. Perhaps that is why he loves him so, perhaps that is why he could never love me.

Oh what is this? What are these scribblings? If the listeners hear me I hope it gives them a headache.

I love my lover with a P, he brings me peonies, pancakes and… I’m an adolescent, a moody, whinging adolescent. No wonder we couldn’t figure out how to roon after all those years. He’d grown in that strange static place, here in the real world? I’d stayed just the same.


End file.
